We Get Letters – “That is the only CD I have ever heard that had Hot Stamper sound quality.”

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of The Doors Available Now

A customer wrote the following to us recently:

Recently I fired up my CD circuit, which does not happen very often.

Once the system was warmed up I played some MoFi gold CDs.

Nothing special, but I did like the Yes Fragile CD. Actually enjoyed it.

Guns and Roses Appetite was nasty…

Supertramp Breakfast was nasty…

Enough of that. Then I read your blog on the Doors LA Woman DCC gold CD. Found I have it!

Played the whole thing and I wanted more of it. That is the only CD I have ever heard that had Hot Stamper sound quality.

Dear Sir,

Steve did a great job on L.A. Woman, let me be the first to say. Of course the real thing on vinyl is even better, but it’s a great way to test how good your front end is, assuming you have a killer copy of the vinyl, something that is very unlikely to be the case but something that cannot be ruled out entirely. (Tell me your stamper numbers and I will tell you if you are close.)

I worked through a lot of changes to my system in the 90s and 2000s partly because I had CDs that sounded better in some ways than my vinyl versions of them.

That never happens now, but it took me 20 years to get there!

For example, this title in the early 2000s did not sound as good as the CD until I got rid of all my tube equipment and discovered the life-changing sound of the EAR 324P and the Dynavector 17d. The transient attack of the drums and cymbals went from nothing special to suddenly sounding like real drums you might hear up close in a small club.

That CD of The Three showed me what I had been missing in terms of presence, dynamics, and most importantly speed and freedom from smear. It changed so many of my ideas about audio in the most fundamental way imaginable.

Of the more than one hundred breakthroughs we discuss on this blog, I might put it right at the top of that list.

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John Lee Hooker – Never Get Out Of These Blues Alive

More of the Music of John Lee Hooker

  • Both sides of this vintage ABC pressing were giving us the big and bold sound we were looking for, earning solid Double Plus (A++) grades
  • It’s one of the best sounding John Lee Hooker albums we’ve heard – exceptionally well recorded at Wally Heiders’ right here in L.A.
  • Features a host of “the greats” lending a hand, including Van Morrison, Elvin Bishop, Charlie Musselwhite, and Steve Miller
  • “…this album continues his work with mostly younger musicians and predates similar projects The Healer and Mr. Lucky by about 20 years.”

With superb sound from beginning to end on this pressing, Hooker is in the room with you, as he should be. The sound is big, rich and lively with a huge bottom end, lots of space, wonderful transparency and real immediacy.

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3s Can Have Amazingly Good Sound, or 3s Can Have Mediocre Sound

Hot Stamper Pressings of Living Stereo Recordings Available Now

But how can you tell which 3s copies sound amazing and which 3s copies don’t?

Below you will see the stamper sheet for a shootout we did not long ago.

A lot of our stamper sheets look like this one, close to half I would guess.

As you can see, the stampers and the sound are all over the map. This is not the least bit unusual in our experience. It’s simply the nature of records — they tend to come off the press with very different sound depending on factors that no one seems to understand very well, not even us!

Note that the album you see pictured is not the record we did the shootout for.

(And on Charade, 3s, for your information, is not a good stamper. It came in last in a recent shootout.)

We are not revealing what record had these stampers and earned these grades for the simple reason that we rarely identify the best sounding pressing of any album. We never give out the shootout winning stampers except under the rarest of circumstances. (We give out plenty of stamper information, just not the stampers of the winners.)

As I’m sure you can understand, we want you to buy the copy with the Hottest Stampers from us, not find one on your own. We’re happy to be moderately helpful, but we have to draw the line somewhere, and giving out “the shootout winning stampers” are where we choose to draw it.

What did we learn from this shootout? Not much, but not nothing either. Indianapolis 3s/3s seems to be the way to go, as long as you buy and clean enough of them to find the one — yes, one! — with killer sound.

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Brahms / Piano Concerto No. 1 – Speakers Corner

Hot Stamper Classical and Orchestral Imports on Decca & London

 

Sonic Grade: B

One of the better Speakers Corner Deccas.

We haven’t played a copy of this record in years, but back in the day we liked it, so let’s call it a “B” with the caveat that the older the review, the more likely we are to have changed our minds. Not sure if we would still agree with what we wrote back when this record came out, but here it is anyway.

One of the best of the Speakers Corner heavy vinyl reissues. As you may know they have gone way downhill lately. Haven’t played this LP in a while but I remember liking it quite a bit back in the day.

As a general rule, this Heavy Vinyl pressing will fall short in some of the following areas when played head to head against the vintage pressings we offer:

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These Two Oscar Peterson Records Didn’t Make the Grade

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Oscar Peterson Available Now

Pictured to the left are a couple of the Oscar Peterson albums we’ve auditioned over the years and found to be less than impressive.

According to the standards we’ve set for audiophile quality sound and music, they just didn’t make the grade.

Without going into specifics, we’ll just say these albums suffer from weak music, weak sound, or both. They may hold some appeal for fans, but audiophiles looking for top quality sound and music — our stock in trade — should take our free advice and look elsewhere.

General Notes

We are not aware of any record Peterson recorded for Limelight that’s worthy of a Hot Stamper shootout.

He made six in the mid-sixties. We’ve played two or three and did not see the point in auditioning others.

As for Pablo Records, Peterson recorded himself, his various groups, and played on the sessions for a great many other artists. At most a dozen or two would be of enough interest for us to pursue and their reviews can be found on this blog.

For those who are looking for the best of the best, some of the records we’ve discovered with top jazz piano sound can be found here.

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Talking Heads – Stop Making Sense

More of the Music of Talking Heads

 

  • A vintage Sire pressing with STUNNING Shootout Winning Triple Plus (A+++) sound or close to it from start to finish – exceptionally quiet vinyl too
  • Every five years, like clockwork, we do a shootout for this superb title — our last was in 2021
  • Both of these sides are big, bold and dynamic, with the kind of energy that you rarely find outside of the live event
  • “. . . ‘A bona fide classic,’ opined Neil Jeffries in a five-star review of the reissue for Empire, ‘a perfectly measured snapshot of a widely loved and respected band playing at the height of their powers … No other band could do this. No other music movie soundtrack sounds this good.'” -Wikipedia

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We Get Near Mint Pressings that Look Like This All the Time

More Entries from Tom’s Audiophile Notebook

The spindle trails are the strongest evidence that this record is more than likely completely worn out and noisy as hell.

At a cost of roughly $50 to send it back, and more than $150 to buy it and have it shipped across the Atlantic in the first place, this is the kind of pain we have to be willing to accept.

We eat noisy records like this week in and week out. There is simply no way around it. If there was another way to find the well cared for pressings that we offer our customers, I think we would have found it by now. If you know of one, please drop us a line.

Once you discover that Machine Head only sounds its best on the early British pressings, and you therefore would like to acquire one for your collection, you have your work cut out for you, my friend. Ask lots of questions and hope you get honest answers.

Folks, This Is Why We Love Vintage Analog

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Emerson, Lake and Palmer Available Now

This is ANALOG at its Tubey Magical finest. You ain’t never gonna play a CD that sounds like this as long as you live. I don’t mean to rain on anyone’s parade, but digital media are evidently incapable of reproducing this kind of sound. There are nice sounding CDs in the world but there aren’t any that sound like this, not in my experience anyway.

If you are thinking that someday a better digital system is going to come along in order to save you the trouble and expense of having to find and acquire these expensive original pressings, think again.

This is the kind of record that shows you what’s wrong with your BEST sounding CDs. (Best not to talk about the average one in your collection, or mine. The less said the better.)

This is the kind of record that somebody might hear in a stereo store and realize that the digital road he’s been going down for so many years is nothing but a sonic dead end.

The organ captured here by Eddie Offord (of Yes engineering fame — we’re his biggest fans) and then transferred so well onto our Hot Stamper pressings (that’s partly what makes them Hot Stampers, right?) will rattle the foundation of your house. This music really needs that kind of megawatt reproduction to make sense.

It’s big bombastic Prog Rock that wants desperately to rock your world.

At moderate levels it just sounds overblown and silly.

At loud levels it actually will rock your world.

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Bruce Springsteen – Born To Run

More of the Music of Bruce Springsteen

  • A Born To Run like you’ve never heard, with outstanding Double Plus (A++) sound throughout
  • Not the best sounding Springsteen record – we think that’s The River – but the most groundbreaking and probably the most important
  • The title track here really sounds the way you want to hear it – big, bold, and full of rock and roll energy that jumps out of the speakers (which, as most of you know, is the kind of thing that never happens when playing modern Heavy Vinyl pressings)
  • A 5 star album in the AMG, and the Boss’ first Masterpiece – who can argue with the power of this music?
  • Marks in the vinyl are sometimes the nature of the beast with these Classic Rock records – there simply is no way around them if the superior sound of vintage analog is important to you
  • “Layers of guitar, layers of echo on the vocals, lots of keyboards, thunderous drums — Born to Run had a big sound, and Springsteen wrote big songs to match it.” (Did he ever!)

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Frank Sinatra – Trilogy: Past, Present and Future

More of the Music of Frank Sinatra

  • A killer copy of Sinatra’s wonderful 1980 release with Nearly Triple Plus (A++ to A+++) sound on all SIX sides – just shy of out Shootout Winner (side four actually won the shootout)
  • The sonics here are rich and full-bodied with much less grain and much more Tubey Magic than practically all other copies we played in our recent shootout
  • Credit the brilliant engineering of Frank Laico for the excellent sound – this record doesn’t sound like 1980, and that’s a very, very good thing
  • “An audacious, ambitious way to stage a comeback, each of the album’s three records was conceived as an individual work, and each was arranged by one of Sinatra’s major collaborators. . . the best moments are triumphant, proving that the Voice was still vital in his fourth decade of recording.”

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